The Films of Robert Breer

“We must go back to the working actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” Merleau-Ponty (1964b: 162)

“I used to take lessons in a biplane and do stunts and things.” Robert Breer (in Griffiths, 1985)

Introduction

American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving animations ‘research’ (MacDonald, 1992: 17) the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).

Two abstract animated films by Robert Breer are examined: 69 (1968 5 minutes) and Fuji (1974 10 minutes): 69 as a metaphor for a system that collapses and Fuji as an articulation of that embodied seeing required for train travel. In their single frame or multiple frame bursts and clusters, these graphic animations contain a mixture of abstract and concrete images that explore the illusion of motion through a reconstituted collage of fragments, sudden appearances and subliminal effects. They can be read as formal reflexive examinations of the tension between the single frame and the perception of motion.

A phenomenological approach is useful in focusing in on the perceptual and performative aspects of this work, emphasising phenomenology’s focus on the pre-reflective moment at the heart of ‘being-in-the-world.’ As ‘a movie is not a thought; it is perceived’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a: 58) these films are read here as about as a direct body centred ‘making sense.’

The ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unknowable’ of trauma may also be of some value in articulating the elusive text of Breer’s moving image art. The relationship between trauma and cinema has generated a level of analytic and critical attention, most clearly indicated by the special debate and dossier sections of the journal ‘Screen’ in 2001 and 2003 where Susannah Radstone (2001) identified a focus on ‘trauma, dissociation and unrepresentability’ evident in the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (see Felman, 1992 and Caruth, 1992) It is argued here that the direct impact of 69 and Fuji re-perform a traumatic effect on the viewer. The flashback is identified as such an effect and the unsettling experience of early train travel is also investigated to illuminate the disorienting reception that Breer’s films can illicit on the unprepared viewer.

The use of Brewin’s neurological research into memory processing evident in trauma is also used here. This is a line of research built on a psychological reading of trauma articulated in the writings of Janet and Van der Kolk.

Pierre Janet, working with the victims of shell shock in the late 1800′s identified that such shock or trauma can be precipitated by severe emotional responses and that such responses effect how memories are stored in a fragmentary manner. ‘Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks)’ (Van der Kolk, 1996a: 214). Baer’s concept of re-windability is also introduced as a method for presenting both trauma and Breer’s films.

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